Findings · 2026-08-19 · By VSNARY | Emmanuel Orta
We scanned 33 AI-visibility and SEO tools: a third publish llms.txt, none publish an entity map
Thirty-three SEO and AI-visibility vendors, run through the same scanner they would point at you.
Every tool in this corpus sells some form of judgement about other people's websites. So we pointed our scanner at thirty-three of them - crawler-identity checks, machine files, cache behaviour, render path, the same battery a paying customer gets - and recorded what came back.The spread was wide. The best vendor site we measured scored 92 of 100; the worst that completed a scan, 41. The median site in this corpus delivers under one visible word in twenty bytes of payload - the rest is markup and script. These are the people who sell payload advice.Roughly a third of the vendors publish an llms.txt. Not one that we scanned publishes an entity map. Several serve a cached copy of a machine file that no longer matches what their origin answers - which means an AI crawler and a human can be told two different things, by the company that audits exactly that.One site could not be measured at all: every path we requested, including one that cannot exist, answered identically. That is a firewall speaking, not a website, and it gets its own story - because the first time we met it, we got it wrong.Two disclosures, because a measurement without them is marketing. First: these figures are a snapshot of the day each scan ran; sites change, and a vendor who fixes their machine layer tomorrow deserves the better number - reports here regenerate live, so following any link shows today's state, not the day we wrote this. Second: crawlcheck.io does not appear in its own corpus. A Cloudflare Worker cannot fetch its own route, so this scanner structurally cannot grade itself from inside. We publish that limit rather than hide it: check our files from any client you like.The uncomfortable summary: the industry that grades machine readability is, on its own machine layer, about average. The average is low.Live, as you read this: the corpus now holds 98 domains across 773 scans. The figures in this piece were measured on the date above; this line is not.
Every figure above came out of this scanner.
Point it at your own domain and see the same measurements, free.
Questions this post answers
Do AI-visibility vendors follow their own advice?
Of 33 SEO and AI-visibility vendors run through the same scanner they would point at you, about a third publish llms.txt and none publish an entity map.
Is that a fair comparison?
It is the same checks, the same client and the same day for every vendor, and no vendor was told in advance.
What does it prove about the checks themselves?
That they are not niche requirements only a specialist can meet. The people selling the advice mostly have not implemented it.